ecommerce-website-design-300x199.jpgNot getting the online purchases you were expecting? While there can be a number of reasons for this unexpectedly low purchases, many companies experiencing this have the same problem, ecommerce website design mistakes. In 2009, Forrester Research published findings of a study showing that on average, a customer was willing to wait 2 seconds for a page to load. If the page was not loaded by 3 seconds, then the majority of individuals would abandon the site and continue looking elsewhere.
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Ecommerce Website Design Mistakes

In a marketplace where page loading time of less than a second means a potential sale lost, speeding up your website performance is absolutely crucial. In fact, by working on ways to improve website performance alone, you can draw even more traffic to your website, providing potential sales when you would not have had them otherwise. As customers looking at competition come to you, a fast loading speed and optimal website performance can be an incredible advantage. Let’s take a look at ways you can improve your website performance, ways to update your ecommerce website design, and successful brand positioning. With that all out of the way, let’s begin!
Common Ecommerce Website Design Mistakes - 800-610-8140

How to Improve Website Performance

Improving ecommerce website traffic can be done in a number of ways. Typically, no single change brings about a marked increase. Rather, it is doing a number of changes that eventually lead to improved numbers through faster speeds.

A common approach to improving website performance and decreasing load times is to reduce the size of the webpages. Every webpage takes up a certain number of kilobytes. These tend to slow down performance. How big is your company? If you are serving clients around the would, then are they located in any particular hotspots? If they are, then you can use content delivery networks to localized website access. This dramatically slows down wait times.

Not only can you affect the amount of information that needs to be downloaded when a person accesses your website, but you can also compress the information, making the loading times even faster. In addition, if you specify the image dimensions, then the browser can load both images and text at the same time, saving time spent loading. Finally, consider monitoring your site speed to see how it changes over time. The more information you have, the better you will be at finding a solution. Not gathering information lie this is one of the worst ecommerce website design mistakes any company can make.

Ecommerce Website Design

As discussed above, speed and decreasing load times is of central importance. Beyond this however there are some minor things that are worth considering. Traveling through the website yourself is an excellent way to see if there are any hick-ups. Keep dead links completely out of the content and makes sure that things like photos load correctly. Make sure that whatever template you are using doesn’t lead to page breaks, as this can slow down load time and looks sloppy. As always, formulating a uniformed aesthetic that ties into your brand image is a great way to settle on a theme for the website.

While you may want to try and handle this in house, you should consider a website design company as well as an SEO company. Specializing in what works right now, both will approach your website performance from either angle, helping to create a website that functions more intuitively on the frontend and is easier to find through work on the backend. What you get from their skill and expertise is a far better setup for your website as well as the knowledge of how to problem solve issues in the future.

Successful Brand Position

An unsuccessful brand position is among the more frequent ecommerce website design mistakes made by companies just starting online. Typically this appears to the customer as a confusing message, where a website is not tied together by an overarching theme and as a result appears jumbled and confused. Positioning your brand in such a way to unite your website under a shared theme or aesthetic that carries over through various pages on the website can help to improve your website performance. It helps individuals know that they are still on your website.

 

Putting It All Together

More than anything else, the amount of time it takes to load your website when clicked on from search engines is crucial to improving your website traffic and theoretical earnings. Besides this, there are countless other ways that you can make slight improvements. Together, these improvements add up to noticeable change. In starting these improvements yourself, consider hiring a company to provide this support for you. With a great deal of knowledge regarding what should be done, you can better market yourself and improve your business as a result.